Luke Dormehl, writing for Cult of Mac:
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs movie had another disastrous showing at the box office over the weekend. With earnings declining more than 69 percent from the previous weekend to just $823,000, the movie was dumped from 2,072 screens — more than any other film.
By comparison, the new Bond movie Spectre took $73 million in its opening weekend.
According to the Steve Jobs movie page on Box Office Mojo, as of November 9th, the movie has brought in a paltry $16,722,018. The good news is, that number only includes domestic gross. Presumably, world wide release will follow and the movie will edge closer to making its money back.
Theatrical movies are made for teenagers. The Jobs movie was awful; even more awful if you’re a teenager.
Adults stay home and watch the tube. Maybe the production costs will be recouped there. Doesn’t matter. To me the movie was a failure on many levels.
I’m an adult a couple times over, and I love going to the movies. And I liked this one a lot, in fact.
The reviews that I heard from real people (as opposed to critics) was that the film was bad, almost entirely fabricated, and not a true reflection of Steve Jobs. So I skipped it. I’ll catch it on Netflix.
I think the problem with the movie is the Steve Jobs most people remember is the one who gave us the iPod and the iPhone, which happened years after the events of this movie. This movie is about the parts of his life that just aren’t that interesting to the average movie goer or the millions of Apple customers who came onboard with the iPhone.
And those of us who are interested in those parts of Steve’s life already know his story. For us, it’s a rerun.
I think that’s why the film was made as it was:
(1) The early part of his career is much more fascinating than the successes that came afterwards.
(2) A retelling of those events as a history isn’t anything new, as you note.
So instead, a deconstruction of the parts of Steve Jobs that were in competition for him, with the story itself really just background.
So first they disrespected the wish of their subject’s family. Then get into a pissing match with Apple. Finally they have the Seth Rogen thing. It’s almost like everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
I’m (nominally) an adult and I go to the movie theater.
Hopefully, everyone involved with making this terrible movie takes a gigantic bath financially, and the movie’s failure acts as an object lesson for all movie makers in how not to do this.
The “oldest trick in the book” is when you write down some fiction and then sell it as if it is true. That way you get the freedom of writing fiction and making stuff up, but you don’t have to do the work to actually generate some greater truth out of your fiction, you just say “this is truth” and people believe you because they don’t expect you to be a liar. But you can’t get away with this gigantic scam anymore because the actual people from the movie have Twitter accounts and they say “that movie is all BS” and then news outlets can write the article “So and So from This True Movie says the movie isn’t true” and that turns moviegoers off. Nobody likes to be lied to.
something tells me that this wasn’t really dumped but rather that it wasn’t booked for a long period cause the theaters really didn’t expect it to make them a ton of money compared to say having 5 screens of the new Bond film